Karel The Robot
Introduction
Karel The Robot is a robot simulator that affords a gentle
introduction to computer programming. Users write Karel programs and
feed them to the simulator to watch them execute. Karel's programming
language is similar to Pascal.
The definitive reference for Karel the Robot is the book Karel the
Robot: A Gentle Introduction to The Art of Programming by Richard
E. Pattis, Jim Roberts and Mark Stehlik (ISBN: 0471597252).
At the moment, Karel should run on most Unix based systems. There is
a GUI that uses GTK, and there is a curses interface. It is built
with GNU automake/autoconf, so the standard configure; make
instructions apply.
Downloads
To download the karel distribution please visit the
downloads page.
Documentation
The documentation is written in GNU Texinfo, and thus is available
here as:
- HTML entirely on one web page.
- HTML with one web page
per chapter.
- HTML with one web page
per node.
- A PostScript file.
- A PDF file.
What's Next
It would be nice to get a Microsoft Windows GUI going so that kids
with PCs available can learn to program Karel. Unfortunately I don't
know much about programming Microsoft Windows.
And it would be great to improve the GTK interface so that it has a
code stepper.
And it would be nice to have a world editor so that user's can create
worlds graphically instead of typing in a text file.
Thanks
Thanks go to Richard Pattis and Jan Miksovsky. Richard Pattis wrote
the book, and Jan Miksovsky wrote the original version of this
software. See the documentation for more
details.
And a great big thank you goes out to the SourceForge
folks for making all this possible.
Updated July 27, 2000 by
Tom Mitchell